On Banishing Merlin

[tozette]

The day Arthur finds out about the magic is the day Merlin is banished.

A lot of stuff actually happens between those two events, but it's less significant to Merlin. Arthur gets saved from the glare of a gorgon and they cleverly turn her to stone, for one. There's also a lot of yelling—a lot of yelling—about the floating mirror that Merlin employs to help with this.

Probably the worst thing Arthur says is, "I thought, if you were a rubbish servant, at least you were loyal!"

Merlin is too aghast to have a good response to this, although in an hour's time it occurs to him that he could have yelled 'I drank poison for you, you royal pillock.' But Merlin rarely has the words he wants, when it matters most.

And then Arthur, Leon and Merlin all storm back to Camelot in grim glowering silence with a gorgon's head in a bag as the dusk grows dark in the woods around them.

So that all happens.

But also, Merlin is banished, which is the most important part in as much as he's concerned.

His recognition for saving the crown prince's life is a commuting of his sentence, which is only possible because nobody bothers to tell Uther about it in the first place.

Arthur doesn't kick him out of the castle at sundown to freeze, at least. Instead Merlin enjoys the hospitality of the dungeons all night, sick to his stomach and sleepless in a cold cell, and then he's got to leave at dawn. He wonders all night what Arthur is going to tell the king about his useless, hopelessly loyal manservant, who will now simply vanish—but perhaps he should rather ask if he'll tell the king at all. He might not. It would be safer for all of them if he didn't.

Uther probably won't even notice. One servant is much the same as another, to him.

In the colourless hours before dawn, Sir Leon comes for him.

"His sentence is banishment," he tells the guards, "I'm to escort him to the border."

And so, Camelot's first knight has been designated Merlin's personal watch dog. It's flattering and offensive in equal measure. He's the prince's sacked manservant, not a live dragon.

The guards give him up without even commenting, so presumably they don't know what he's been arrested for either. Huh.

That morning finds him in Gaius's cluttered chambers, shoving everything he owns into a bag by candle light. It's not much. Servants are paid mostly in room and board, and have few coins to spend on frivolities like... more clothes, or a second pair of boots.

Incongruous among the comfortable chaos of measuring instruments and cloudy glass bottles and hanging herbs, Sir Leon watches him pack awkwardly from just inside the door.

Gaius's craggy face is creased and drawn into an expression that would be ferocious if Merlin knew him less. These predawn hours are a strange, grey, still time, when only the watchmen and the bakers really ought to be up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the years since Merlin got here, Gaius has gone and gotten old. This morning, he's older than ever.

"You should count yourself lucky you're not dead." And yet, Gaius doesn't sound like he finds it lucky, because he sighs deeply. "What will you do?"

"No idea."

"Merlin."

He looks up. "No, really. I don't know. I've just got banished, haven't I? I haven't the foggiest. Visit my mum?"

He really should. She'll worry, otherwise, when she gets the next letter he will have to write her. He's painfully aware of Sir Leon standing there, stiff and still, listening to every word.

Merlin has found him comforting, before. He's a good knight: faithful, dutiful, slow to decide that violence is the answer and quick to act once he's decided. But Merlin doesn't know, now, if those characteristics of Leon's are, well, on his side anymore.

He does not know where Leon stands, personally, on the matter of magic. He's never asked. For obvious reasons, Merlin studiously avoids the topic.

And now he doesn't know if he looks grim because seeing a friend banished is a grim duty, or if he looks grim because he's watching Merlin, waiting for him to commit an infraction that's worth killing him over.

What a mess.

"You can't stay in Ealdor," says Gaius wearily. "Otherwise you would not have left it in the first place."

"Yeah. I know." He knows this better than anyone. "But it'll be good to visit while I—while I sort myself out. My plans."

His plans. His plans. What plans can Merlin make, really, when Morgana is right here in the heart of Camelot, poised to strike? Surely Uther won't last the year.

Uther might not even last out the rest of the month.

Arthur, though. Merlin has better hopes for Arthur. He doesn't have to be living in his pocket to protect him... although he'd prefer it. And Arthur is better liked and less unbending, anyway. Just because Morgana wants to kill him does not mean she'll succeed so easily as that.

Gaius nods, accepting.

Neither of them says anything for a long moment after that, and Gaius goes to collect several things he's determined Merlin must have, if he's forced to go off on his own. First is an old leather saddle bag stuffed with food, although Merlin has no saddle and certainly no horse. Then it's a linen envelope filled with tiny sachets of dried herbs. Then cloudy glass bottles of medicines, ones that won't lose their potency even if they aren't fresh. They're medicines that have been used since Roman times: autumn crocus for the heart, nightshade for the nervous system, poppy juice for pain...

Merlin sees Sir Leon watching him steadily from the corner of his eye, even as he accepts these familiar tinctures wrapped in rags right from Gaius's worn hands.

The knight is doing the job Prince Arthur has told him to do. It is a direct abrogation of the law as handed down by king and council. Merlin swings wildly between feeling personally offended and powerfully resentful—enough to make the candles flicker fitfully away from his temper, like it's a physical thing—and existing in the cruel grip of perspective. Banishment is the best Arthur can give him. Following his orders to watch him and make sure he really leaves at dawn is the best Sir Leon can give him.

And yet, Merlin is bitter.

His stomach is tight and his eyes sting at regular intervals, threatening furious tears.

...Merlin is frightened, too. But anger feels better than fear.

"This is for you, too." Gaius startles him out of his dark and spiralling thoughts with one last gift. "I have no misgivings about giving you this, now."

It's a roll of soft vellum enclosed in a little wooden tube. Merlin looks at him, and then unrolls it and reads, glancing up at him moment to moment. Gaius has put his own good name to it. Merlin, it says, is a physician whose skills and character are in good standing with the court physician at Camelot.

It does not say he's in good standing with the king or the prince, which is... good, probably. But it's skirting the edges of a lie. Especially with the little seal at the bottom: the Pendragon dragon, curled around the physician's staff. It's the seal specific to the physician of the court.

Merlin raises his eyebrows. Gaius only rarely even permits him to see a patient alone, because apparently he'd lose his head if it wasn't attached. "Really?"

Ealdor doesn't need a physician. It can't support one. Everyone in a village that small needs to be working in the fields so they all live through the hungry gap at the end of winter. And winters have been getting very, very long these last few years. A physician doesn't work in a place like that, although he may travel through. He works in an army or for a mercenary company, or at a fortified settlement like the castle here in Camelot, or the old Roman Londinium, off in Mercia.

"Just in case," Gaius offers, quirking a significant eyebrow.

Their goodbye is sentimental and teary.

Leon walks with him to the border, although he brings his horse. The animal's head bobs as it ambles along beside them.

Leon doesn't speak to him, at first, which is actually quite useful, because it gives Merlin the chance to provide last instructions about the care and keeping of Arthur.

"There are sorcerers trying to kill Arthur every other week," Merlin tells him. "You have to keep a look out. Anyone new. Anyone suspect. Make sure George gets my job—Arthur hates him but he's been vetted. Get someone else to open his gifts, even if you think they're from someone trustworthy." Like Morgana. "Don't let him get enchanted. Check for cantrips under his bed, in his pillows, in his clothes—you have to feel the seams. Don't—"

"Is this why you started?" Leon wonders, tipping his head back to squint at the sun rising, soft pink and burning red on the horizon. "Using sorcery, I mean."

Merlin stalls. His brain is full, but his mouth is empty. "Uhh..."

"Only, you don't seem like the type."

"The type?" Even in Camelot, sorcerers have never seemed to have much of a 'type,' to Merlin. They appear among the lowest and the highest in society, and use magic for applications ranging from regicide to healing blisters.

Leon reflects. "Desperate," he amends. "Or religious."

Oh. Well.

That.

"Can you think of any reason why all the sorcerers you find in Camelot might seem like desperate nutters?" he sighs. "But I'm not from here. I was born with it and my mum sent me to live with Gaius to learn how to control it."

Leon starts. "I wasn't aware one could be born with the... with magic. Stop that," he adds to his horse, who is taking advantage of the loose rein to snag grass from the side of the path. He takes her bridle by the cheek piece and brings her head closer, the better to keep an eye on her. "She knows better than to eat with her bit in."

Merlin thinks most horses actually know one thing and one thing only: how much they can get away with, under whose watch. He doesn't say that Leon's a soft touch with his horses. If he doesn't know by now, there's no point telling him.

"Most sorcerers learn it. You can be born with it. I was... struggling in Ealdor." Merlin is very tired. Funnily enough, spending all night in the dungeons and then getting roused before dawn hasn't left him with much energy for putting one foot in front of the other. It makes him more honest than he might otherwise be. Or perhaps he'd be this direct with anyone who knew. It's hard to say. He's been keeping it quiet for so long.

He puts one foot in front of the other and finds himself missing Lancelot powerfully. Maybe he will try to find him, he thinks, after he sees Hunith. But Lancelot could be anywhere by now.

"Is that where you're going now?"

"Seems rude to get banished from a whole kingdom, cross the border, and not even visit my mum, doesn't it?"

"Your mum," Leon says slowly.

"Yeah. Sorcerers also have mothers, you know. One of the first people I rescued Arthur from was a sorcerer's mum, actually."

"I recall. That was when the king made you his manservant."

"Uh-huh. Used magic for that, too." He's already banished—what can it hurt? It feels weirdly cathartic to be this honest, for a change.

"I was at that feast, but I noticed nothing out of the ordinary."

"Yeah. I slowed time."

"Slowed time?"

"Yep. No idea how. No training, you know."

Leon's face is a mix between deep alarm and wondering if Merlin is having him on, which actually makes telling him a lot more fun.

So on their two day walk to the kingdom's border, Merlin takes the opportunity to unload every bit of magic that ever saved Arthur right onto Sir Leon's dutiful shoulders. If nothing else, it will give him a really good idea of what sort of thing to look out for while Merlin's banished.

At the border—marked by heavy stones and the curve of a stream—Leon leaves him.

Merlin isn't sure if he's changed his opinion on sorcery. But he reckons he has at least impressed upon him the sheer amount of danger Arthur is exposed to in a citadel that refuses magical protection.

"Leon," Merlin says gravely. "Don't let Arthur get killed."

And now that he has the past two days as testimony to how bloody hard that is, Leon looks appropriately daunted by the responsibility. But he squares up, exhales, and says: "You have my word. I won't."

Which is all you can really ask for, Merlin guesses.

He wonders what Kilgarrah would have to say about this. Extracting this promise from Leon is a lot like outsourcing his destiny, really. Probably he'd have nothing particularly flattering to say about, but when does Kilgarrah ever say anything nice?

...Good thing Merlin isn't going to bring it up to him.

"Right," he says, watching Sir Leon mount up and turn his horse right back around towards Camelot. He looks very picturesque, a big strapping man on a shiny bay horse with his long red cloak. He could be a painting, framed beautifully with the sun rising over the landscape behind him. "That's that, then."

And Merlin shifts the weight of his bag higher on his shoulder and puts one foot in front of the other, on his way to Ealdor...